Privacy policy

Effective October 24, 2026. Chukar is made by Nelson Holdings (Ethan Nelson) ("we").

The short version

On your phone

Your pins, tracks, areas, folders, tags and photos are stored on your phone. The app uses your location to show where you are, record tracks and check location alerts. Your location stays on the phone, with three exceptions: it's part of any item you sync or share; it's sent to the people you choose if you share your location (see below); and if you turn on weather alerts, or the weather radar layer with its forecast card, your position (or the middle of the map, if location is off) is sent to the U.S. National Weather Service (api.weather.gov) to look up the alerts and forecast there.

To draw maps, the app downloads map tiles and public data (for example from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service and OpenStreetMap, and from GitHub, which hosts Chukar's downloadable map data). Like any website, those servers see your IP address and which map area was requested. They don't receive your saved items. If you use the map's search to look up a street, city or business online, the text you typed (and roughly where the map is looking) is sent to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service; searching your own pins never leaves the phone.

If you create an account

We store your email address and a hashed password, used to sign you in and to email you sign-in codes.

If you turn on sync

We store copies of your folders, tags, and pins, tracks and areas: their locations, names, notes, colors, and a recorded track's times and altitudes. Photos are not synced. This data is used only to keep your devices in step. Locations of your saved items are personal data, and we treat them that way: only you can read them.

If you share your location

Sharing is off until you start it, person by person, for a time you choose (24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days, or until you stop it). While it is on, your phone sends its position to the people you chose. The position is encrypted on your phone so that only their phones can read it: we store only the scrambled data, only the latest one for each person, and delete it when the share ends or is stopped. We can't read it. We do keep a record of who is connected to whom (by the names they chose, not email addresses) and when sharing starts and stops. Sharing needs an account, not a subscription. Connecting takes a one-time code you give the other person, so nobody can find you by your email.

If you share pins

When you share a folder or a pin, we store a copy of what's shared (its locations, names, notes, colors, and an imported line's times and altitudes; not photos or tags, and recorded tracks only if the folder's owner turns that on) so the people you invite can see it, and those you let edit can change it. Unlike a shared location, shared pins are not end-to-end encrypted: they are stored like synced items, and only the people in that share can read them. We also keep who is in each share (by the names they chose, not email addresses), whether each can edit, and who last changed each item. When the share is stopped, or 60 days after its owner's sync subscription ends, its items are deleted from our servers; each person chooses whether to keep their copy on their phone. Joining takes a code from the person who shared it. Sharing pins is part of the sync subscription; joining a share needs only an account, and without the subscription you can add up to 100 pins of your own to folders others share with you.

If you're in an organization

When you join an organization (with a code, or automatically because your email address is at a domain the organization holds), its owners and admins can see your name, email address, role, how and when you joined, and whether your account is turned on there. They can't see your own pins, tracks, areas or location; only items in the organization's shared folders, which are stored like shared pins (see above) and belong to the organization. We keep the organization's name, its members and roles, its email domains, and its join codes (only a scrambled form of each code). When you leave or are removed, your membership ends; the organization keeps its folders.

Purchases

Personal subscriptions are sold by Google Play or the App Store. We never see your payment details. RevenueCat, which manages subscriptions for us, receives your account's ID and your purchase history so it can tell us whether your subscription is active.

Organization plans are bought on the web. RevenueCat runs the checkout and Stripe processes the payment, so they receive the buyer's email address, name, billing address and card details, under their own privacy policies. We receive the organization's plan, seat count and whether it's paid up, never the card number.

Who processes your data for us

Keeping and deleting your data

We keep your account and synced items until you delete your account. You can do that in the app (Settings → Account & sync → Delete account) or on the delete account page, or email ethan@pediasync.com and ask us to delete it. Deleting it deletes your account and everything synced to it from our servers straight away. What's on your phone stays there. On Google Play we also stop your subscription from renewing; check in Google Play that it's cancelled. On the App Store, deleting your account doesn't cancel a subscription: cancel it in the App Store.

If your sync subscription ends, your synced items stay on our servers, locked, for 60 days so you can pick up where you left off if you resubscribe. After that we delete them, and keep nothing but your account. What's on your phone stays there.

Children

Chukar isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update the date above and, for significant changes, tell you in the app.

Contact

ethan@pediasync.com